Angelique - Part 1. Marquise of the Angels Chapter 2 - Read online

Fantinc began to anticipate the coming of bandits and armies. The countryside seemed peacctul enough, but the nurse, who divined so many things, ‘sensed’ the brigands in the heat of
that sultry summer. One could see her turning her face towards the north, towards the road, as if the dusty wind was carrying their scent to her.
It took very few signs to inform her of what was happening far away, not only in the district, but even in the province and right up to Paris.
After buying some wax and ribbons from a pedlar from the Auvergne, she was able to apprise the Baron of even the most important news concerning events in the kingdom of France. A new tax is going to be levied, a battle is being waged in Flanders, the Queen Modier no longer knows what to do to find money and content the greedier Princes. The Sovereign herself is ailing; and the King with the fair curls is growing out of his trunk-hose, as is his younger brother, called the Petit Monsieur, since his uncle, King Louis XIII’s brother, is called Monsieur and is still alive.
Cardinal Mazarin, meanwhile, is piling up knick-knacks and paintings from Italy. The Queen loves him. The Parliament of Paris is not pleased. It listens to the cries of the poor people in the countryside, who are ruined by wars and taxes. In rich coaches and fine ermine-lined coats, those gentlemen of Parliament drive up to the Louvre, where the little King lives, clutching with one hand at the black dress of his mother, the Spanish woman, with the other at the red robe of Cardinal Mazarin, the Italian. They try to prove to these mighty ones who only dream of wealth and power that the people can no longer pay, the burghers no longer trade, that everyone is tired of being taxed for his least possession. Soon, no doubt, they'd have to pay tax for the bowl out of which they eat! The Queen Mother is not pleased. Nor is Monsieur Mazarin. So the great lords carry the little King to his seat of justice. In a well-modulated voice, though stumbling a little over the lesson learnt by rote, lie replies to all those grave persons that money is needed for the armies, for the peace that will soon be signed. The King has spoken. Parliament bows. A new tax will be created. The provincial administrators will send out their sergeants. The sergeants will threaten. The good people will beg, cry, grab their sickles to kill the agents and tax-collectors, and leave their homes for the roads to join the disbanded soldiers, the brigands will come. . . .
Listening to the nurse, it was hard to believe that the single doltish pedlar could have told her so many things. She was accused of inventing things when she merely guessed them. A word, a shadow, the passing of a bold beggar, a troubled merchant, put her on the path of truth. She ‘sensed* the bandits in the thundery heat of that lovely summer of 1648. And with her, expecting them too, was Angcliquc.
That evening Angcliquc had decided to go cray-fishing with Nicholas, the mule-herd. Without warning, she had dashed down to the cottage where Nicholas’s parents lived. The hamlet of three or four hovels stood on the edge of the vast forest of Nieul. The ground that the Mcrlots cultivated, however, belonged to the Baron de Sance. Recognising their master’s daughter, the peasant-woman lifted the lid of the cauldron on the fire, and threw in a piece of bacon to strengthen its flavour.
Angelique put on the table a chicken that she had just strangled in the castle farmyard. This wasn’t the first time that she had invited herself to the peasant’s table and she never failed to bring a small present, the seigneur being the only one, by feudal right, to own a dovecot and a chicken-coop in the vicinity.
The man sitting by the fireside was eating black bread. Francine, the eldest child, came to kiss Angelique. She was two years older than Angelique, but, having had to look after her younger brothers for a long while already, she no longer went after crayfish or mushrooms with her vagabond brother Nicholas. She was sweet-tempered and polite, and her pretty checks were pink and fresh. Madame de Sance wished to take her on as a chambermaid to replace Nanette, whose impudence disconcerted her.
When they had finished dinner, Nicholas pulled Angelique aside.
“Let’s go round by the stables, I’ll pick up a lantern.’’
Out they went. The night was very black; a thunderstorm was brew¬ing. Angelique remembered afterwards that she had turned her face towards the Roman road which passed half a mile away, and that she had thought she heard a faint rumble.
It was even darker in the woods. They soon reached the brook, and set out their baskets baited with chunks of bacon on its bed. They would raise them from time to time, dripping and laden with clusters of blue crayfish, lured there by the light. They threw them into a pannier which they had brought for this purpose. Angelique did not think for a moment that the keepers of the Chateau du Plcssis might come and catch them, and that there would have been a pretty hullabaloo if they’d discovered one of the Baron de Sancc’s daughters poaching by lantern-light with a young scamp.
Suddenly she sat up, and so did Nicholas.
“Didn’t you hear something?”
“Yes, someone shouting.”
The two children stayed motionless for a while, then returned to their fishing. But they were distracted and soon stopped.
“This time I heard it plainly. Someone’s shouting over there.”
“It came from the village.”
Nicholas quickly picked up their fishing-tackle and strapped die pannier
on his back. Angelique took the lantern. Walking noiselessly, they returned over a mossy path. As they approached the edge of the forest, they stopped suddenly. A rosy light filtered between the trees and lit up the trunks.
“It . . . it isn’t daylight?” murmured Angelique.
“No, it’s a fire!”
“Good Lord! Perhaps it’s your home burning. Let’s hurry!”
But he held her back.
“Wait! There’s too much shouting for a fire. There’s something else.”
They advanced cautiously towards the first trees. A long meadow sloped down to the nearest house, the Merlots’, and five hundred yards farther die three other cottages huddled by the roadside. It was one of them that was burning. The flames from the roof lit a teeming throng of men who were yelling, running, dashing mto the cottages, tottering out of them laden with legs of ham, or pulling cows and donkeys.
The mass of them, coming from the Roman road, flowed along the path like a thick, black river. Bristling with sticks and pikes, the stream passed by the JMerlot farmstead, submerged it, rolled on towards Monte- loup. Nicholas heard his mother scream. There was a shot. Old Merlot had had time to unhook his old musket and load it. But a little later he was being dragged out into the yard like a sack and assailed with sticks.
Angelique saw a woman in a chemise running across the yard of a house, fleeing. She was screaming and sobbing. Men were pursuing her. The woman tried to make for the forest but was caught by her pursuers, who wore dragging her across the meadow.
“It’s Paulette,” whispered Nicholas.
Pressed against each other behind the trunk of an enormous oak, they watched the horrible scene, wide-eyed and gasping.
“They’ve taken our donkey and our pig,” Nicholas again ventured.
Dawn came, paling the flames of the fire, which was already dying down. The bandits had not burned down the other shacks. Most of them had not stopped at this insignificant hamlet. They were sweeping on towards Montcloup. Those who had stopped to loot the four houses were now leaving the scene of their exploit. One could sec their ragged clothes, their hollow, bearded cheeks. Some of them wore wide-brimmed, plumed hats, and one of them even had a kind of helmet. But most of them were clad in shapeless and discoloured rags. They could be heard calling to one another through the morning mist that was rising from the marshes. There were only some fifteen of them left. A little beyond the Merlots* hut they stopped to compare their plunder. Their gestures and tone indicated that they considered it pretty meagre: a few sheets and
handkerchiefs rifled from the chests, some pots, coarse bread and cheeses. However, one of them was biting into a ham. The stolen cattle had gone ahead. The last looters collected their miserable haul in two or three bundles and wandered on without even a backward glance.
Angelique and Nicholas waited a long time before leaving the shelter of the trees. The sun was already bright and making the dew sparkle in the meadow when they ventured to descend into the hamlet, which was now strangely silent.
As they approached the Merlot farmstead, they heard a baby cry.
“It’s my little brother,” whispered Nicholas. “He at least isn’t dead.” Still fearing some bandit might be lingering, they crept noiselessly into the yard. They held each other by the hand, pausing at almost every step. They first came across the body of old Merlot, his nose in the dung-heap. Nicholas bent down, tried to raise his father’s head.
“I think he’s dead. Look how white he is, and him always so ruddy.” Inside the cottage, the baby was screaming. Sitting on the overturned bed, he was waving his little fists in distress. Nicholas ran towards him and picked him up.
“Thank you, Holy Mother, nothing wrong with the little mite.” Angelique was staring horror-stricken at Francine. The girl was stretched out on the ground, white and with closed eyes. Her dress was turned up to her stomach, and she was bleeding.
“Nicholas,” murmured Angelique. “What . . . what have they done to her?”
Nicholas looked and a terrible expression suddenly aged his face. He turned his eyes towards the door and growled:
“The pigs! The dirty pigs!”
Abruptly he handed the baby to Angelique.
“Hold him.”
He knelt down by his sister, modestly pulling down her torn petticoat. “Francine, it’s me, Nicholas. Answer me, you aren’t dead?”
From the near-by stable came a groan. His mother appeared, moaning and bent double.
“It’s you, son? Ah! my poor children, my poor children. What a calamity! They’ve taken the donkey and the pig and our meagre savings. Hadn’t I always told my man to bury them?”
“Are you hurt, Maman?”
“Never mind about me. I’m a woman. I’m used to it. But my poor little Francine, she’s such a tender little tiling, it may well be the death of her!”
She was rocking her daughter in her big peasant arms, weeping.
“Where are the others?” asked Nicholas.
After a long search, they eventually discovered the three other children, a boy and two girls, in the bread-hutch where they had been hiding while the robbers had started raping their mother and sister.
Meanwhile a neighbour came for news. The wretched people of the hamlet gathered to take stock of their misfortunes. There were only two dead to mourn: old Merlot and another old man who had also tried to use his musket. The other peasants had been tied to their chairs and beaten, but not to excess. None of the children had been throttled, and one of the rent-farmers had managed to unbolt the stable doors for his cows to take to the fields, where they were sure to be found later. But a lot of clothes and good linen had been stolen, all the fine pewter for the fire-places had gone, and there was little food or hard-earned money left.
Paulette kept weeping and screaming.
“Six of them! Six of them!”
“Shut up,” her father told her brutally. “Knowing the sort you are, always running after the boys in the bushes, I wouldn’t wonder you enjoyed it. Whereas that cow of ours, which was with calf! I won’t find her as easily as you’ll find another swain.”
“We must go away from here,” said Madame Merlot, still clasping the unconscious Francinc in her arms, “there may be others coming after them.”
“Let’s go into the woods with the cattle that are left. We did it before, when Richelieu’s armies marched through.”
“Let’s go to Montcloup.”
“Monteloup! That’s where they’ll be looting now!”
“Let’s go to the castle,” someone suggested.
They all approved at once.
“Yes, to the castle.”
Their ancestral instinct sent them scurrying to the scigncuric, to their master’s sheltering walls and towers which, for centuries, had cast a pro¬tective shadow over their labours.
“Yes,” Angelique said, “let’s go to the castle. But we mustn’t take the road nor the short-cuts through the fields. If the brigands should still be around there, we’d never get as far as the gate. The only thing to do is go down to the dry marshes and approacli the castle from the big moat. There is a small door that is never used, but I know how to open it.”
She did not add that this little door, half-blocked by the rubble of an underground gallery, had served her as an escape more than once, ahd that one of the dungeons, whose existence the present Barons dc Sancc hardly suspected, was the hiding-place where she concocted her potions and philtres like the witch Melusine.
The peasants had listened to her confidendy. Some of them only now noticed her presence, but they*were so used to thinking of Angelique as a fairy come to life again that her appearance in this hour of their misfortune hardly surprised them. One of the women took the baby from her arms. Then Angelique led her little troop by a long roundabout way across the marshes, under the broiling sun, along the steep bluff which had once dominated this gulf of Poitou, lapped by sea water. Her face grimy with dust and dirt, she urged the peasants on.
She let them in through the narrow opening of the abandoned postern- gate. The coolness of the underground passage gripped and refreshed them, but the darkness made the children cry.
“There, there,’* came Angclique’s reassuring voice. “We’ll soon be in the kitchen, and Nounou will serve out soup.”
Following the daughter of the Baron dc Sance, the peasants climbed the half-crumbling stairs, moaning and stumbling, passed through the rubble- filled halls, from which the rats scurried. Angelique moved without hesitation. This was her domain.
When they reached the large vestibule, the sound of voices alarmed them for a moment. But Angelique dared not imagine, any more than the peasants, that the castle might have been attacked. Nearing the kitchen, they were encouraged by the aroma of soup and hot wine. There were certainly many people there, but they weren’t bandits, for the tone of the conversation was low, measured, and even sad. Other peasants from the village and the rent-farm had already come to put themselves under the protection of the old crumbling walk.
When the new arrivals appeared, there was a general shout of terror, for they were taken for brigands. But at the sight of Angelique the nurse rushed forward and clasped her in her arms.
“My treasure! Alive! Oh, the Lord be thanked! And thank you, Saint lladcgonde, Saint Hilaire!”
For the first time, Angelique stiffened against the fervent embrace. She had just led ‘her* people through the marshes. For hours she had felt this wretched herd behind her. She was no longer a child! Almost violently she freed herself from Fantinc Lozier’s arms.
“Give them something to eat,” she commanded.
Later, almost as if in a dream, she saw her mother approach with tearful eyes, and fondle her cheek.
“You’ve caused us such anxiety, my daughter!”
Pulcherie came too, consumed like a bumt-out candle, her acne in¬flamed by crying, and her father, her grandfather. . . .
Angelique thought this procession of puppets extremely funny. She had gulped down a big bowl of mulled wine and was completely dazed, plunged into a blissful torpor. Around her, people were exchanging comments on the events of the tragic night: the village sacked, the first houses burnt down, the mayor hurled out of the window of the upper floor which he had been so proud to add to his house only quite recently. Those looting heathens had, moreover, invaded the little church, stolen the sacred vessels, and tied the Cure with his servant-girl to his own altar. They were surely possessed by the devil! How else could they have dreamt of doing such things?
In front of Angelique, an old'woman was rocking her granddaughter in her arms, a big girl with tear-swollen face. The grandmother kept nodding her head and repeating ceaselessly with a mixture of awe and horror:
“The things they’ve done to her! The things they’ve done! It’s not believable! . . .”
There was talk of nothing but raped women, beaten men, cows stolen, goats dragged away. The sexton had held on to his donkey by the tail, while two bandits were pulling it by the ears. And the one who screamed loudest in the hubbub was the wretched animal!
However, a good many people managed to escape—some to the woods, others to the marshes, most of them to the castle. There was plenty of room in the yards and halls to shelter the cattle rescued with such difficulty. Unfortunately, their flight had drawn some of the looters towards the castle, and things might have turned out badly, despite Monsieur dc Sance’s musket, had old Guillaume not had a sudden inspiration. Pulling with all his strength on the rusty chains of the drawbridge, he had succeeded in raising it. Like cruel but frightened wolves, the brigands had shrunk back before the miserable ditch of stagnant water.
Then there ensued a strange spectacle. Old Guillaume was standing at the postern, shouting insults in his native tongue and shaking his fists towards the ragged, fleeing figures in the darkness. Suddenly one of those tatterdemalions had stopped and answered him. It made a weird dialogue, across the fire-reddened darkness, in that Teutonic tongue that grated on your spine and gave you goose-flesh. Nobody knew exactly what Guillaume and his compatriot had been saying to each other. But it was a fact that the bandits efidjaatjetum and left the village at dawn. Guillaume was considered «ОрЙот whose military shadow it was good to rest.
The inciden^proved, at any ri*te, that the robber-band, which had
seemed to be made up of country beggars and city paupers, also contained soldiers down from the north, disbanded after the peace treaty of West¬phalia. These armies raised by the Princes in the King’s service were made up of all sorts: Walloons, Italians, Flemings, men from Liege and Lorraine, Spaniards, Germans, a whole world that the peaceful people of Poitou could not even imagine. Soon some people asserted that among the bandits there had even been a Polack; one of those savages whom the Condottiere Jean de Werth had not so long ago led into Picardy, where they had throttled infants at their mothers’ breasts. People had seen him. He had a perfectly yellow face, a fur bonnet, and no doubt an enormous amorous capacity, for by the end of the day all the women of the village declared that he had had his will with them.
The gutted houses of the village were being rebuilt. This was done quickly: mud mixed with straw and reeds made quite solid cob walls. The peasants set about gathering those crops that had not been sacked, and they were good, which was a consolation to many. Only two little girls, one of whom was Francinc, did not recover from the violence they had undergone at the hands of the brigands. They both contracted a high fever and died.
Thus the brigands’ incursion into the lands of the Baron de Sance did not really much affect the normal life of the castle. Of course, the old grandfather grumbled more often about the insubordination of the Protestants and the misfortunes that had befallen the country after good King Henri’s death.
“Those people personify the spirit of the country’s destruction. I used to blame Monsieur de Richelieu for showing them such harshness. But he wasn’t harsh enough.”
Angclique and Gontran, who that day were the only members of the family to hear Grandfather’s profession of faith, looked at each other with an air of connivance. Present-day events were completely beyond Grandfather’s grasp!
All his grandchildren adored the old Baron, but rarely accepted his out-moded judgments.
The boy, who was now almost twelve, dared to remark:
“Those brigands, Grandfather, weren’t Huguenots. They were Catholics who’d deserted from the famished armies, and foreigners who hadn’t been paid, they say, or else peasants from the battlefields.”
“They had no business to come here, then. Besides, you can’t make me believe that they weren’t helped by the Protestants. In my time, the army, I admit, paid the troops badly, but regularly. Believe me, all this disorder is of foreign inspiration, English perhaps, or Dutch. They demonstrate and reassemble, all the more so since the Edict of Nantes was too lenient for them, allowing them not only the right to confess their beliefs, but also equality of civil rights. . . .”
“Grandfather, what is this right that has been left to the Protestants?” Angelique suddenly inquired.
“You are too young to understand, little girl,” said the old Baron. He added:
“Civil rights represent something that you can’t take away from people, without losing your honour.”
“Then it isn’t money,” remarked the little girl.
The old gentleman complimented her:
“That’s perfectly correct, Angelique, you really do understand things that are beyond your age.”
But Angelique felt that the subject required still further explanation.
“So if the brigands loot us completely and strip us naked, they still leave us our civil rights?”
“Exactly, my child,” answered her brother.
But there was irony in his voice and she wondered whether he wasn’t making fun of her.
It was hard to make out Gontran. He spoke little and lived very much by himself. Unable to have a tutor or go to college, he had to make do, by way of studies, with the intellectual rudiments which he could glean from the schoolmaster and the village priest. Most of the time he with¬drew to his garret to crush red lady-birds or grind coloured clay in order to execute strange compositions which he christened ‘pictures’ or ‘paint¬ings’. Though very careless of his person like all the dc Sauce children, he of ten reproached Angelique for living like a tomboy and not keeping to her station.
“You arc not as stupid as you look,” he added that day, by way of a compliment.